What needs to happen to ensure that CanVOST can be of value for the upcoming flood and forest fire seasons.
We are once again being reminded this week, how important social media has become for emergnecy information and incident response. The terror attacks in Boston on Monday and the fertilizer plant explosion in Texas, just a few minutes ago, illustrate the point.
Canada is not immune to emergencies and disasters. In fact, we know there will be spring flooding and forest fires this summer. In many cases, these incidents will occur in smaller and remote communities where local officials do not have the capabilities to monitor social media ....Hence the value of CanVOST.
Team members who have professed their interest in playing a role in future emergenices are reminded to:
- send me a note on the completion of the online intro course on the Incident Management System on Emergency Management Ontario's website. It's free and takes about an hour. This ONLY applies to those not already working or involved in the field of emergency management.
- send me an note on the completion of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's course on social media in emergencies (IS-42) which is another free online resource. (this applies to all team members)
- send me a photocopy of a valid police check (available at your local police service for a small fee). This requirement will go a long way in getting authorities to feel more confident with working with volunteers. This applies to all team members who DO NOT work for a munciipal/provincial/federal public sector entity. Civil servants are usually screened.
- Send me a note on their availablity for online/web-based training on basic social media monitoring and analysis tools + a demonstration of the SAINT software which has been offered to the team by RDANA technology (watch a video here on the technology).
Please ensure you fulfil these requirements by the first week of May ... we will then quickly schedule basic training oriented on virtual team collaboration and social listening.
Thanks to all that step up !
5 Comments
Excellent start to get ready for this season, Patrice. Here is what I have done to have PTSC-Online support what you are trying to accomplish.
If I have missed anything or anyone has suggestions on how we can organize this better, please post them as comments to this article.
Nice work in getting this off the ground!
To all those interested in being a CanVOST volunteer. It's not necessary to actually obtain a certificate from FEMA for the IS-42 social media in emergency management training. There might actually be some difficulties in getting that. Just a note from you that you've completed the online course will suffice. The same applies to the EMO online IMS-100 course.
This comments highlights changes I made to the CanVOST space to help it support CanVOST long term. I appreciate the tremendous amount of effort you put into trying to get CanVOST up and running Patrice. The fact that all the feedback is going back to you personally will add to your workload. We may need to start that way but longer term we need a system to efficiently manage how CanVOST operates, because any system that depends on one or two individuals has a high probability of failure, especially in the heat of a crisis. The changes I propose will help spread the workload, eliminate bottlenecks and make it easier to assign responsibilities to other individuals or groups. They are:
This can form the beginning of a system to help develop and manage the operation of CanVOST if you and the other supporters agree to use it. We need to ask for a decision on this. It will certainly need some fine tuning but I believe it is a start. It still does require a group to be formed with responsibility to validate individuals who have declared they are trained and provided proof of training and move them into the Trained Volunteer's Roster .
What are your thoughts, will this help?
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